I have decided to keep the Inventory Service on the same VM that hosts the Single Sign-On application. My plan for the moment is to have three virtual machines:

one for vCenter Signle Sign-On and its database + the Inventory Service,

one which will host the vCenter Server DB,

one for the main vCenter Server service.

I will then install the Web Client on my workstation and from there I will manage the whole infrastructure.

Remember that vCenter Server 5.1.0a requires vCenter Single Sign On and Inventory Service to be installed in this order before proceeding to installing the vCenter Server service.

Let's start mounting the iso image and choosing Inventory Service from the installation menu:

Enter the FQDN of your server:

Accept the default ports (10433 for HTTPS, 10109 for service management and 10111 for Linked Mode communication) unless they conflict with other applications or you are bound by firewall to other specific ports:

Choose the size of your JVM heap memory based on the number of hosts and virtual machines you have. This is the size of the memory for Java objects for the Inventory Service, which is a Java application:

The following screenshots show you my Java memory use on this brand new installation with no hosts:

The java instance with a working set of more than 500 MB is the Single Sign-On application, while the other one with 280 MB is the Inventory Service.

On the next screen we have to enter the information to connect the Inventory Service to the Single Sign-On service. Since I am installing both services on the same virtual machine, there is no need for me to update the Lookup Service URL. Port 7444 is the port that we defined in the last installation screen of Single Sign-On in the previous post.

Now we just have to accept the SSL certificates installation and click on finish. We are done with installing the Inventory Service under the folder C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Inventory Service which is roughly 75 MB in size.

The next step is to install the vCenter Server and its database, which I will discuss in a coming post.

Thanks for the tip, but in my actual configuration I'll have just one vCenter. I am also wondering if the inventory service server could allow more than one instance and support more than one vCenter. Any thoughts?